Playing video games can be serious work. As someone whose job is writing about his favorite hobby, the separation between the two is blurry by default, so it’s always refreshing when I come across games as low-stakes as Messenger by Abeto.
Messenger places you in an idyllic little rural town that looks to have been plucked straight out of a slice-of-life anime. Throughout, you’ll meet people who’ll ask your help in delivering packages for them. That just about covers the entire game, other than some light player customization and the ability to toss emojis about.
As you can see from the screenshots, the little digital diorama you inhabit in Messenger is certainly soothing on the eyes, the background cast of everymen and the quiet urban furniture of its petite world rendered with tasteful cell shading. And by world I mean an actual globe—the entire town is wrapped around a large Mario Galaxy-like planet. A side effect of this is that the horizon is only a couple hundred meters away, resulting in steep sloping and extreme distortion around the edges of your screen. It’s a visually pleasing effect, if sometimes annoying to work the in-game camera around.
In my own playthrough (which was at most 15 minutes long), I encountered a few individuals who looked suspiciously like myself. Thinking I’d been thoroughly Journey‘d, I attempted to communicate with them (💩💩💩💩💩) but was met with silence. I’ve since learned that those were definitely other players just trying to conduct their deliveries in peace. Could it be that my raining down of poop emojis was mistaken as an act of aggression? (P)oops.
As I said: very low-stakes. There’s no biting critique hidden under the pastel, no grand message it wants to convey, other than, perhaps, that its developers are very, very good at what they do. Abeto is a creative studio that specializes in ‘interactive realtime experiences’, and the whole of Messenger was built in WebGL. As a hobbyist web designer, I can tell you that’s a level of craftsmanship akin to witchcraft, so props to them for such an impressive tech demo.
Play the game for yourself here. All you need is a browser and a few minutes.
